Decisions, made simpler

weeknotes

30 Dec

A quiet week and potentially the last weeknote of the year. I’m grateful for being thrown a lot in the deep end, avoiding burnout and enjoying a more balanced office + WFH routine in 2025.

This week

Spent most of my time in the product domain, analysing differences between two offerings (and how this impacts CX)
Lots of discussions in parallel to 1) Challenge these differences based on potential for customer harm, 2) Proposing recommendations to mitigate differences that can’t be helped
Streamlined governance on our decision > issue log so questions and risks don’t just live in a meeting or chat, but have a single home. This bit still needs some work, as we’re going through a bit of a re-teaming process with extra layers of governance.
Did a fair bit of ‘translation work’ between different journey maps, so that teams like finance, pricing and harms are aligned to the proposed experience
Attended a strategic storytelling workshop by Julian Cole—highly recommended and did not disappoint!

Designing today, to mitigate tomorrow

Designing for a future-state experience that joins up two parts of ‘as-is’ was a good reminder that customers don’t really see things in the same way. For most customers, this journey will be unique (and likely never happen again), which I’m optimistically seeing it as an opportunity. A lot of the decisions we’re making involves cherry-picking BAU processes vs inventing new: Can we reuse the same onboarding process? Can we hand them back to the same team?

It’s a deliberate balance between customers wanting to do what they’ve always done, while the ground moves under them. When we put people in difficult decisions, we have a responsibility to 1) Give context, 2) Make it fair, and where we can, 3) Provide a fall-back.

The most valuable conversations we had this week weren’t big workshops, but rather smaller conversations where we presented the same decisions on 1-pagers for teams to choose themselves. It made internal decision-making (about decisions for customers) much easier to do. That’s because 1) Each option had a clear list of pros and cons, 2) These options were considered harmless, and 3) We considered Plan Bs and unhappy paths too.

Looking ahead

Next week, I’d love to simplify and sharpen decision-making: fewer scattered docs, more ‘source of truth’ views, and clearer ownership around risks and questions. I’d also like to carve out a bit more deliberate time for learning (not just passively reading articles) so the ideas I’ve been picking up on AI and storytelling actually feed back into how I manage and operate, not just in craft.